After leading the protest movement against the government’s planned judicial overhaul at the beginning of 2023, Israeli academia quickly fell into line after October 7. From militant speeches and op-eds defending a “just war” to the mass enlistment of Israeli students in the reserve service, the academy broadly supported the war in its first months.

What my academic colleagues fail to grasp, but what my activist friends understand clearly, is that the Israeli government’s ongoing assault on democratic norms and institutions cannot be separated from its genocidal oppression of the Palestinian people. They make up the two lobes of the same right-wing brain.